". As always, our ADF will be there to clean up the mess and wipe the snot from US bully boys."
Did you really write that?
Trump and Kim are both cookies , maybe not smart but . The pressure keeps imploding on Kim from both borders with a volcano thrown in for comic relief. Probably his relatives are sharpening kitchen knives in vengeance. And maybe the odd general wants to stay alive . If Kim turns to drink or substances he may out-clown Trump.

There are three Confucianist countries in the world, China, Korea and Vietnam. Vietnam fought China over eighty times in the past two thousand years. Korean culture is more Confucianist than Chinese culture is itself. Edwin O. Reischauer calls Yi Dynasty Korea A Model Confucian Society. "The Koreans in the early Yi dynasty adopted Confucianism with such enthusiasm that their value system and social practices were restructured along Chinese lines more fully than than ever before...it (Korea) may have become more uniformly permeated by Confusian ideas than China was itself. In fact, Korea became in many ways an almost model Confucian society...(Reischauer, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, co-authored by J. K. Fairbank and A. M. Craig)." To be continued.

Hi Michi,

And now a huge proportion of the population is Christian. The point seems to be that Koreans are quick to learn from outside ideas and innovations. I hope that today's election will see an innovative and imaginative new President.

Wouldn't it be possible to massively expand the existing Economic Zones, to broaden heir investment base to include China and Japan, and provide North Korea with employment, the development of expertise, and revenue ? And thereby reduce the pointless tension between North and South Korea, which allows a genius like Trump to move his boats around the pond and think he's won something ?

After all, to keep this stupid situation going must be costing China, Japan, South Korea and the US a huge amount in dead-duck military expenditure: why not move some of that over into peaceful production ? Win-win-win !

Cheers,

Joe

In that sense, Korean culture is more fundamentalist or fanatical. Confucius lived in the sixth century B.C. His writings were an expression of nostalgia for the golden time that in his theory existed but which never existed. Perhaps the first revolutionay event in Chinese history was the advent of the Chin Empire (221~206 B.C.). It set the pattern, for later ages, of the Chinese political system of despotic centralisation of political power. Confucianism underwent a slow but drastic change in the next dynasty, Han, and became the orthodoxy or Chinese catholism of the ruling elites. "Despite the condemnation of later ages, Legalism left a lasting mark on Chines civilization. Through the triumph of Chi'n the imperial system that Chi'n originated, it became an important part of the Chinese political tradition, partially accounting for the highly centralized government of later times and its harsh and arbitrary rule (Reischauer, ibid)."
"...the reality of (Chinese) empire was that of a hard core of wei, or force, surrounded by a soft pulp of de, or virture (June Teufel Dreyer, China's Tianxia: Do All Under Heaven Need One Arbiter?, YaleGlobal Online).
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/chinas-tianxia-do-all-under-heaven-need-one-arbiter.

Koreans say, "Japanese abducted two hundred thousand Korean women and girls to force them in prostitution. They were killed by Japanese when the Japanese surrendered." For this, I would like people to read my comment, American Humanism, on The Chinese Comfort Women, amazon usa.
Some details by a Japanese professor are available in English and Japanese at the following:
http://www.seisaku-center.net/sites/default/files/uploaded/TheComfortWomenIssueinSharperFocus.pdf.

In postwar Hiroshima City, like some other cities, there were orphans. Koreans took care of the girls, not boys, not as philanthropy but as investment for their traditional, national industry.

Loudmouth,
Korean Chritians do not give off scent of ecumenical enlightenedness, at least to me as I smell for it. They smell far more of Korean culture.

Mr. Moon Jae-in was elected new President. He had said during the campaign he would go first of all to the North to meet its leader. He was one of the chief advisers to President Roh Moo-hyun. In 2007, the United Nations was trying to pass a resolution to condemn the North's serious violation of human rights. As was revealed by the then-Foreign Minister Song Min-soon's memoirs last year, he suggested that Seoul should ask the North's opinion about it. Pyongyang's reply was that it did not like the resolution at all, so Seoul opposed it in the UN.
The Japanese ambassador Muto met with him in Pusan (Busan) a little before the South Korean presidential election of 2012. Muto wanted to enlarge his view of the South Korean-Japanese potential of an ecnomic win-win. But as Muto said on TV in Japan, he showed little interest. According to Muto, he asked instead about Japan's willingness to improve its relations with the North. Muto surmised that if Japan improved its ties with Pyongyang Seoul would get its relations with Tokyo better.

I want denuclearized North first before anything else.